06/24/2026
THIS IS WHY FULL NO TILL FARMING DOESN'T CATCH ON UP NORTH...
I just finished planting spring crops into standing rye in northern Minnesota, just like all of the dirt nerd videos say. Up here, it takes this long for rye to get to the dough stage where it can be terminated with crimping or mowing. Pretty consistently, it's towards the end of June before it hits the right growth stage. It actually wasn't quite there yet, but I had to get that stuff in the ground!
The problem with trying to implement the same no till system up here that they do down south is that by the time the rye hits the dough stage in late June, we are already real tight to 90 days from our first frost the first week of October. If I wait to plant until the rye is ready, I've missed out on a lot of spring rains and heat days. By the time I plant, we are hitting 90° smoking hot no consistent rain type weather. That's bad news for crops needing 90 days to maturity, even with a cover crop.
The good ol' boys down south that do all the videos showing us how easy the no till system is never point out the most important component to the no till crimping system…TIME. There's a good 8-12 weeks of growing season we miss out on up here compared to zone six, seven, and eight where all of the no till videos are filmed. Heck, even zone five southern Wisconsin, gets another month easy over what we get up here in zones three and four!
Why does that matter? If your rye pops down south in February or March, then you can get your soybeans or corn or milo or sunflowers or sugar beets or whatever you want to plant into your cover crop much much earlier. When I was in Missouri this spring for consults, corn was going in the ground mid March! Back home we were still frozen solid!
The bottom line is to always absorb information with a regional filter. No matter the quality of the video production or how expensive the farming equipment or how experienced the consultant or how many big sponsor names on the video, you're not gonna be able to do the same habitat schedule in the upper Midwest that you're going to get to do in southern Missouri or Georgia or Tennessee. Use the concepts you can tolerate that can work at your latitude, and pitch the rest.
Sometimes what they gurus say just doesn't work where you live. Don't check your brain at the door.
